GPL 3.0 goes live at 5PM UK time

Item: You can't get into London's red and usually tranquil labyrinth because some guy drove a car packing a large bomb into the centre of one of the world's busiest cities. I think these people are known technically as fruitcakes.

Item: We've lost the Tone and got a new prime minister, Gordon Brown. Big fellow, doesn't smile a lot except when Raith grab a late equaliser against Hamilton Academicals or there's a fat Excel file to be going over of a night.

Item: The smoking ban starts Sunday. Good, except every pub is going to need to be done out so the smell will be staleness, followed by paint, rather than 80 Bensons.

Item: Chantelle and Preston are splitting up. Say it ain't so.

Item: Apple just launched something called an Ifawn. We'll be on to it soon.

And just to cap it all, at 5PM UK time today, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) version 3.0 will be released to a grateful world and a party will take place in the fine city of Boston. Samuel Adams ale and copious bowls of chowder will be consumed, we take it, by coders and briefs.

GPL 3.0 doesn't replace the 2.0 version and supporters say the coexistence of the pair should not be an issue unless developers seek to merge code rather than run programs side by side. Linus Torvalds hasn't been too positive so far but even in that particular corner there are hints of peace in our time.

Changes regarding patents and the Novell-Microsoft pact have been well covered elsewhere, of course but the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman also sees the 3.0 release stopping what he calls “tivoisation” -- the phenomenon that occurs when appliances that use GPL but shut down if they detect modified code.

If like me you feel a sudden drowsiness and cotton-wool feeling in the old cerebellum when the subject of open-source/free/community software licences comes up, then you need to speak to an expert.

Douglas Levin is CEO of Black Duck, a company that's scoring a reputation for tools that automate code inspection for IP and other reasons, and has participated through the GPL 3.0 process.

He praises the "remarkable and open" process of the 3.0 development, although he adds that "the jury is still out" on how many projects will move over to the new licence.

The Free Software Foundation is supposed to be running a video feed of the live unveiling of GPL 3.0. Yesterday, the group also contrasted its view of the world with that of Apple and the Iphone. µ